Nuno Silva

Orion’s Belt Development Blog

With the current development of Orion’s Belt 2, we (the team) decided to create a development blog to release some informations about the developments we are making, new alpha releases and concept art of the game.

You can check it at http://blog.orionsbelt.eu. Also subscribe the rss feed of the blog: Orion’s Belt Blog RSS Feed.

Some facts about Video Games (in numbers)

According to ESA (Entertainment Software Association):

• 65% of the Americans play Video games
• 35 is the the Average age of a gamer
• 26% is the percentage of the gamers that are over 50 years old
• 60% is the percentage of Male gamers (which leaves the women with the other 40%)
• 13 is the average number of years that adult gamers have been playing games
• 59% is the percentage of gamers that plays with other gamers in person
• 38% of the houses in America have, at least, a video game console
• 10 out of the 20 most sold games of 2007 where Nintendo games
• 63% of parents believe games are a positive part of their children’s lives.
• 83% of the time children receive their parents’ permission before purchasing or renting a game.
• 88% of the Parents monotoring their childs games.

Note: All the above facts were taken from the ESA document at http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2008.pdf.

The document also have another facts about videos games, like the list of the 20 most sold games for consoles and pc (with World of Warcraft at the 2 top positions of the PC Games).

Prince of Persia IV

This is another of the games in my “must have” list. I’m currently playing the trilogy of Prince of Persia and i’m loving it. Although they are great, Prince of Persia IV promises to be even greater.

In a previous post i released some images of the new prince of persia. This time, here is a in game video. By the looks of it, the game is fantastic!!!!

After this 2 games (street fighter and Prince of persia) i only need God of War 3 and i’m happy for a long long time!

Street Fighter IV

This time i think they actually did it. Capcom finally brought street fighter to a new era. Without losing it’s personal mark (the 2D fighting system), they managed to insert 3D characters and animations in a game that i consider a “must have”.

About the gameplay, only when i get my hands on the game, i will know if it the has evolved for better or worse.

Meanwhile, where is a in game video (Excellent, by the way):

Recursive operator == because of a null

I came up with a simple error that can make lose some hours around something has simple has an operator.

imagine that you have the following operator definition:

public static bool operator ==(Player c1, Player c2) {
	if( c1 == null && c2 == null ) {
		return true;
	}
	if ( c1 == null || c2 != null ) {
		return false;
	}
	return c1.Id == c2.Id;
}

The above code should work in a normal situation. But not in a situation where we use the operator inside it’s own definition. The code will enter a recursive state and it will eventually generate a Stack Overflow Exception.

So, in order to avoid the usage of the operator == inside it’s definition, you can use the alternative:

the Equals Type method inherit from object.

The following code demonstrates the correct implementation of the operator ==:

public static bool operator ==(Player c1, Player c2) {
	if( Equals(c1,null) && Equals(c2,null) ) {
		return true;
	}
	if ( Equals(c1, null) || Equals(c2, null) ) {
		return false;
	}
	return c1.Id == c2.Id;
}